rooftop films

We warned you that Flying Lotus’s debut feature, Kuso, would be one of the grossest, weirdest movies in recent memory. Sure enough, after last night’s Rooftop Films screening an audience member had just one question for FlyLo.

Last week we shared some details of the summer offerings at Sunset Park’s Industry City – including mini-golf, ping-pong, and a satellite eatery of the Frying Pan, the wildly popular floating restaurant at Pier 66 Maritime in Chelsea.

As ’90s “it” author JT Leroy once put it in a book title, the heart is deceitful above all things. But not as deceitful as LeRoy himself ended up being. Embraced as a hard-living, gender-bending literary wunderkind by everyone from Bruce Benderson to Bono, the troubled teen author was famously outed as a fabrication of Laura Albert, a somewhat less troubled 40-year-old woman. A new documentary about this bizarro episode in literary history, Author: The JT LeRoy Story, recently premiered at BAMcinemaFest– if you missed it there, Rooftop Films is offering another chance to see it, Aug. 18, with Albert and filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig in attendance.

Sitting outside on a balmy summer night and watching one of your favorite films with the Manhattan skyline in the background almost makes the stinking mounds of cooking garbage on the street and the hellish temperatures in subways stations worth it. With that in mind, here are some of the best upcoming outdoor film series this city has to offer. Best of all: Most of these are free!

It was kind of ironic when the sold-out, sneak-peek screening of Weiner sputtered out, turning into a glitchy, hallucinatory version of itself at Rooftop Films’ Industry City screening last week. While everyone else seemed to be weathering the drizzle just fine, the projector wasn’t so resilient.

The great giver of free things, House of Vans, has announced they’re teaming up with Rooftop Films (the latter just dropped their 20th-anniversary summer programming) for two undeniably sick events happening next week. The super group of summertime chill times are calling the almost back-to-back affairs “cinematic music events,” and for the low, low price of $0 you too can see two music-centric documentaries followed by performances from Danny Brown, The Casualties, and more. It’s all happening at House of Vans. Read on for more deets.

The summer al-fresco screening series turns 20 years old this season, which officially makes Rooftop Films a millennial– meaning they’re addicted to their phones, underemployed, over-entitled, and why don’t they just grow up already and chain themselves to a cubicle desk and support the only real man in this race Donald Trump? Did that sound curmudgeonly enough to come from the desk of David Brooks or something? I figure the only way to drive the olds out of a universally beloved series such as Rooftop Films is to convince them either that it will somehow induce diabetic reactions and/or edema or that, like Snapchat, it’s something that only Millennials would understand.

Sit back and enjoy some mind-rattling films screening this weekend and beyond. A new documentary brings us deep into the complex, overlapping layers of South Sudan’s contemporary social and political developments under the influence of Neo-colonialists, and get a sneak preview of an Austrian thriller rife with horror movie. And of course there’s more. Read on.

Sadly, this documentary about the world’s most famous sixth-grade metal band (straight outta Flatbush) is only three minutes long, but if Unlocking the Truth’s set at Cameo was any indication, these will be a monstrously heavy three minutes.

Brooklyn filmmaker Adam Newport-Berra, who has shot music videos for the likes of the Dirty Projectors as well as the feature First Winter, climbs into the director’s chair with a mumblecore-esque Kickstarter-backed film about a brother (or is he?) who throws a wrench into her sister’s relationship during a Thanksgiving dinner. Williamsburg’s own Reggie Watts has a role.

OK, so we know this is hardly in our ‘hood, but the promise of going to space via Coney Island (gratis!) just proved too great a temptation. Hang out in a deep space disaster zone with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, while director Alfonso Cuaron keeps you on the edge of your seat.

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Bedford + Bowery is where downtown Manhattan and north Brooklyn intersect. Produced by NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute in collaboration with New York magazine, B + B covers the East Village, Lower East Side, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick, and beyond. Want to contribute? Send a tip? E-mail the editor.